


City of the Fireflies

by Whosewoods



Category: City of the Fireflies
Genre: Gen, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2018-12-17 18:34:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11857296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whosewoods/pseuds/Whosewoods
Summary: Em is alone. She runs down an empty road with the cold air of a moonless night turning her lungs to stone and her heart to ice, while her feet drag at the world beneath her in rhythm to the boom of a far off bell, which every sleeping soul will ignore. Gasping for each breath, she feels as though her head will spin off into the stars. And it is wonderful.An original work.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> An original piece, lemme know what you think!

 

Em is alone. She runs down an empty road with the cold air of a moonless night turning her lungs to stone and her heart to ice, while her feet drag at the world beneath her in rhythm to the boom of a far off bell, which every sleeping soul will ignore. Gasping for each breath, she feels as though her head will spin off into the stars. And it is wonderful.

Em is one of two souls awake. The other is her father, who never sleeps, who will wander the house alone until the morning comes, to spend the day complaining about how tired he is. And she slips past him each morning, pressing a kiss through the bristles of his cheek, before she slips out the front door to run off into the dawn and exhaust herself before the long day begins. This has been her habit for three years running and she has broken with the routine only once. Once. Today. Today Em tried to sleep in, keeping her eyes closed by force of will until the faraway bell struck four. She dressed in the glow of her watch.

‘Slept in, sweetheart…?’ her father asked, brushing past and through his daughter as if she were the open air.

‘Yep…’ Em replied. Kiss on the cheek. Out through the door. Out into the morning.

And after running a mile, Em staggers to a stop in the village square, barely more than a large dirt patch with a few market stalls scattered across it. It suits the place well. The buildings here are thatch and plaster. Fresh water comes from a single well. The few electric lights they have will flicker out in ten minutes. She misses March Edge.

‘Hey…’

She barely hears the whisper.

‘Em! Hey!’ Fresh light falls across her shadow, then dies in an instant. There is a boy stumbling blind and stupid towards her.

‘Hey…’ Em whispers back. She knows him well enough. Thom works beside her in his mother’s grocery shop. Worked. Works. Thom is making her nervous. He’s not carrying anything.

‘Where’s-’

‘I told mum…’

‘What?’ Her stomach turns. ‘Thom!’

‘I’m sorry! She caught me-’

‘And you couldn’t think of anything smart to say?’ Em had never lost her temper, but she was close. She was so close…another shadow has appeared, in the doorway behind Thom. The grocer was framed in a tombstone of light.

‘Is that Em?’ she calls to Thom. The boy looks back towards his mother, then to Em, helpless.

‘Hi, Ms. Pender…’ Em says. She inches around Thom so the grocer can see her clearly. She offers a smile. To her relief, Ms. Pender nods back.

‘Morning Em. I thought I gave you the day off.’

‘She was just coming-’ Thom lets out a gasp as Em steps on his foot.

‘I thought I’d run some errands.’

‘So I was told.’ Em feels Thom flinch back a step. ‘You better come in.’ The grocer motions with a turn of her shoulder. Thom darts past his mother and into the shop. Em follows, but her way block by an embrace.

‘Happy birthday, sweetheart…’ The words vibrate down her spine. Ms. Pender wears rose-scented perfume, which could choke you at a distance. Buried headfirst in her chest, it’s like Hell is a garden, or a pair of breasts.   

‘Thanks.’ Is the best Em can manage with her remaining breath. She pulls away and wipes her nose on her sleeve and Ms. Pender makes a show of not noticing.

‘How’s your father?’ She moves like an overfed cat, half-stumbling where she means to glide. The grocer settles behind her till.

‘He’s okay,’ Em replies, half-listening. She’s looking for Thom. He’s fled somewhere into the depths of the shop. ‘He’s...’ She drifts off, only coming to after a prolonged silence. ‘Um, he’s, busy.’

‘Too busy to swing by the village?’

‘No. No…he just forgets…’ Still distracted, Em misses her tone entirely. Then she thinks twice. ‘I mean, with his job. He’s busy.’

‘Poor man...’ Ms. Pender was wealthy enough to afford electric light. The globe hung behind the counter, just over the framed photo of her late husband. Both figures, living and dead, look content, and Em feels a pang. As if he wasn’t already the village stranger, now everyone would be whispering about her father’s apparent memory loss. ‘And how about your Uncle?’

There’s a noise from the back as Thom reappears, a box in his arms. Ms. Pender produces a note from her pocket and Em can see her own handwriting in shadowed form, mirrored through the paper as the grocer holds it to the lightbulb.

‘Ten cans: two beans, three corned beef, five mixed vegetable; first aid kit, with aluminium carry case; one packet of salt, one packet of sugar; two canisters of lantern oil…’ She reads out each item in clear voice that carries to the far side of the village, her eyebrow threatening to raise with each word. When she finishes, she hammers at the till for a solid minute, before returning her gaze to Em.

Em digs into her pockets, pouring a handful of crumpled notes and a few scattered coins on to the counter. ‘We’re expecting family.’ Ms. Pender counts them with the tip of a finger, dragging each to the till, one at a time, until Em is ready to scream.

‘Next time, sweetheart, come right to me when you’ve got an order.’ She brushes Thom’s cheek and offers Em a smile. ‘Okay?’  

Em forces a smile in return and tries her hardest not to sprint out of the store.

 

She makes it as far as the village square before the panic sets in.

It’s not unexpected. She’d felt it coming since the moment she opened her eyes, a small tremor in the pit of her stomach, her heart twisting and turning rock solid until it threatened to drag her to earth. She cradles the box as her legs give way, sitting back and turning her head towards the sky as she struggles for air.

‘There are…seven hundred…and…thirty…four…stars in the night…sky…conventional science dictates…that there must be more in the universe…but so far even the best telescopes…have failed to…to…find more than a few…the brightest…stars that are visible to the naked eye…include the constellation of Hawking-Aeon and the…Gaia star which is bright enough to be visible during the day…’ Em looks down to earth and she can almost see the City…

 

‘Em?’

Em comes to her feet. A sudden rush of blood catches her off guard. ‘What? I- fuck, Thom!’

He’s followed her outside and he looks properly ashamed for it. ‘Sorry! I mean…sorry, again. I…are you okay?’

‘I tripped. I’m fine. Thank you.’

‘Yeah, alright.’ The boy falls silent. But he doesn’t move. Em chooses to wait until he has the courage to speak again.

‘That order,’ he starts. ‘That’s a lot.’

‘Yep.’ She can’t see Ms. Pender. So Thom came out here on his own.

‘Em?’

‘What?’

‘You’re not going to do anything…’ he’s struggling to find the words, which is all he needs to do. Before Thom can finish, Em has given away her second kiss, placed on the curve of his jaw as she hugs him.

‘You suck at keeping secrets.’

She picks up the box. And for all she knows, this is the last time she’ll turn her back on the boy who begged his mother to give her a job.

 

***

 

‘Happy birthday!’ Is the first thing she hears. The first thing she feels is the cannonball impact in her sternum. Her baby sister is perched on top of her. Katie’s hands paw at her arms, starfish-shaped against the grain of her skin.

‘Morning, baby…’ Em gasps. She presses her palms into her eyes. Her could she have fallen asleep? Between the blurred morning vision, peeking through a finger and thumb, she spots her pack. She catches her breath.

‘Boo!’ Em wrestles the baby into her lap, delighted squeals making her ears ring. She pins the flurry of movement with a hug. ‘Happy birthday to me!’ Pinwheeling arms fix around her neck, crushing with an imitation of force.

‘Happy birthday!’ Katie says again.

‘How old am I?’ Em asks her. She manipulates the somehow already sticky fingers, opening both tiny palms, then closing her hand around one. ‘Ten. And five. Make how many?’

Katie bites her lip, either unwilling or unable to suffer mathematics. ‘Five?’

‘Fifteen, cheeky!’ Em blows a raspberry into her neck.

‘Fifteen!’ The new voice is an older rumble, softly spoken, as if the owner was speaking to a sleeping child. Em’s father lingers in the doorway. ‘She’s a big girl, Katie. Isn’t she?’ Katie nods wisely in response. ‘Too old for a hug?’

‘Never.’ Em accepts it, burying her nose into his shoulder so she can feel him humming “ _hap-py birth-day to you…_ ” under his breath. He slides an envelope into her lap.

‘My present first.’ He spoils the surprise before she finishes breaking the seal. ‘I know you’ve been desperate to go.’ Em had been. She was. Inside were three tickets for the train, on a round trip from March Edge. She hugs them both again.

There were more gifts; a letter from the grandparents, promising a visit soon and a cash gift in the meanwhile; one from her cousins, tins of homemade jam that she set to one side; a parcel from an aunt she’d met once, a porcelain doll, grimy, antique and preloved.

She feels something nudge her foot. Em looks down to see another present, perfectly wrapped. There was no card. She didn’t need one, judging by the way her father held it at the tips of his fingers, like he thought the bundle of silver paper and twine was a precious gift set to explode. ‘Your mother. Mum…’

Em took it. ‘I’ll open it later.’ Later, she’d throw it in a neighbour’s bin.

He stares at it for a moment, then suddenly claps his hands and grins. ‘So, breakfast? I can make you toast, or toast.’

‘What about Uncle Peter?’

Her father stumbles in place, hanging halfway out the bedroom door. ‘Oh…’ and he drifts off, as if he expects the noise to satisfy her. ‘I mean, Em, maybe we should wait…’

‘Dad, please?’ She’s inherited his tell, of brushing the bridge of his nose with a thumb when he’s trying to lie. He relents, crossing to his own bedroom and back in the blink of an eye.

The last present of the day is tossed to Em, not out of spite for her, but the one who wrapped it for her in layers of newspaper, who tied an untidy silk bow, which falls apart at her touch.

Inside is a lantern.

Her runs hot. Cold. This is nothing like the oil or wax-candle lanterns one can find everywhere. This is smaller, shaped like a hollow teardrop wrought in a blackened metal cage, secured at one end by a thick ring. There’s a belt in the package, too, with a place for the lantern to hang, to rest against the hip. Three pyramid-shaped blocks sit amongst the crushed newspaper, with a square of letter paper: “ _Happy birthday, psycho xxx_ ”

He knew. Didn’t he? Uncle Peter had a way of knowing.

 

***

 

March Edge was once home, and it seems a world away from the village. Here is noise and movement, the sky dimmed in places by soot from factory steeples, criss-crossed with power lines, flashes of sunlight rebounding off a passing tram car. There is a smell in the air, bittersweet. The people, too, are different. Ruder. Harried. Clever. They’d jostle you in the street, but remember to mutter an apology. Em has only been gone a year and she is still in awe from the moment they jump down from the train. Katie threatens to pitch out of Em’s arms as she twists about, pointing and shouting at everything new. She’s squealing about the sight of a sign made from twisted, glowing tubes that clings to the wattle-and-daub of a pub. Em’s father mutters something about pointless spectacle.

They rest up in a tea shop across from a grand theatre, whose name escapes Em. Katie buried her nose in a slice of cake as Em and her father attempt to finish two cups of the single most expensive thing on the menu.

‘So, plan for the day,’ Em’s father says, lingering over his _Kāfēi_ with a teaspoon of honey. ‘First, we head to the University and walk about for a while, see if we can’t get a tour, then shopping on Oldham Lane, visit Grandma and Grandpa, and make it home in time for a birthday dinner.’

He stares at her, eyebrow raised. Em attempts another sip, twisting her lips at the taste.

‘Boring,’ he starts before her. ‘Boring, right?’

‘Kind of?’ Em replies. Her father starts laughing. ‘What?’

‘Are you that scared of shopping?’

‘I mean, you like it...’

‘And the University?’

‘I’m fifteen.’

‘You’re clever.’ Still, he relents first. ‘Alright, okay, you’re in charge. What’s our plan, smartarse?’

‘I want to just walk around. Spend some time…’

‘Great. Good! Love it! We’ll walk around and enjoy the culture. Then, the University.’

‘Dad!’

‘Oh, please? We can call it my birthday present, if you like?’

‘But…’ Em’s stomach turns. His birthday is next, and she’d meant to get a present for him, give it to Thom to pass on and she’d run out of time. Her father’s looking at her. ‘Let’s just enjoy the day…before we go to University. On one condition.’

‘Thank you! What’s the condition?’

‘Let’s never drink _Kāfēi_ again.’

‘Oh, god yes. Deal.’

He’s all too eager to get moving. He reaches for Em’s pack as he stands, and she’s too busy separating Katie from her cake to notice. She doesn’t look until she hears the muffled rattle of its contents, and there’s nothing she can say by the time she sees it, the weight of the pack warping its shape as it hangs from his hand.   

Her father seems surprised. Almost surprised. Uncle Peter would say that he had a clockwork face, that you could watch his expressions tick over.

‘So…’ he begins. ‘You do know we’re only here for a day, right?’

If anything should to memory of this day, it will be those words, because he never speaks of the pack again. He lets Em carry it, as he sweeps Katie up on to his shoulders and they journey on through March Edge, through a haze of smoke and the ambiance of strangers.

Once more they are in familiar streets. By habit, they walk down past her old school, where Em can see former friends in the low windows of her old class, which were built for daydreaming eyes to stare out of; she never made friends with any other daydreamers, so nobody familiar catches her walking by.

Beyond the school, their old street and their old house, which they glance at, and carry on quickly. Her father is easily dissuaded from visiting her grandparents, but this comes at a cost, as now he steers them through the streets towards the University. By some miracle, this detour takes them by a toy store, and Em joins in with Katie as she begs to go inside. They manage an hour or so, as Em follows her sister around, helps her burden their father with an armful of trinkets. She worries for a moment that…no, all is well.

They almost make it to the University, too, close enough that her father begins to talk about Em’s future. But as they cross a final road to reach the great iron gates…oh…

 

It’s easy to ignore, with practice. Live in March Edge long enough, and you train yourself to never look up beyond the tallest rooftops in town. But there are moments when the distant sight of the City overwhelms the deepest sense of shame, when your eyes lead your head by your wildest dreams to the blue-grey form that lingers on the horizon. Then you cannot forget why there are electric lights, and trams and trains and glowing signs and bitter cups of _Kāfēi_. The City looms large, with strange towers clustered, the tallest among them overwhelming the clouds in the sky. It is large enough that you cannot estimate distance, that you might walk towards it for an hour or a day and never so much as reach its longest shadow. It is wide enough that it takes a week by horse to go even partway around. It is…

Em takes her father by the hand, feeling like a child. He follows, knowing better. They abandon the University, tracing their way through lanes and streets whose design is bent towards leading people in some kinder direction, though it almost always fails to do so.

Her father tries to keep up the flow of conversation, but every topic falters. ‘We should save this for the end of the day…’ Or not at all. But he never resists, not with Em’s hand clutching his.

All too soon, they’ve found their way. Every other path leads to some set of shops, or a dead end road, but every determined tourist or wary resident can find the one lane that breaks through the last unfaltering blocks in March Edge, the gentle slope dipping down until the path is broken up into steps, a narrow way that suddenly spills out into a small paved square.

The town is well named. March Edge clings to the precipice of a high cliff. Em remembers the map of it, of the great, unbroken plummet that circles the City, carved so perfectly into the heart of the earth that the sides are nearly smooth. She never noticed how high it was…her father holds Katie tightly as Em lets his hand go, drifts as far as the railing. Below her is an expanse of marshland, patches of green marred by still pools and the skeletons of trees. The scent of old water rises up in the noonday sun.

‘Sweetheart, come back from there…it’s getting windy…’ Her father tries to make it sound like a joke, but there’s panic in his voice.

The marsh is flat like the surface of a coin, but for the spire of some ruined monument, an obelisk of weathered stone, broken in places, rising up from the waters. It’s a jump away. Maybe. Maybe…

Em steps back. There are quite a few others here today, other tourists, merchants trying to sell souvenirs, painters trying to sell artwork. There are even a few townspeople, mostly her age. Some are playing at the railings, daring eachother to lean over. This was a stupid idea. And Katie is getting restless.

 

But Em is frozen in place. There are strangers among them: ten, maybe eleven boys and girls around Em’s age, dressed no differently and talking among themselves as if they were normal people. The tone of the crowd is different, now. It isn’t anger, necessarily, or fear, or even curiosity.

But they know at a glance that these people are Fireflies.

Their leaders are at the front of the pack, deep in conference. A boy, cut from all the wrong colours, hair too black, skin too pale, tall and thin and built as though he was sewn together from the winter winds. And a girl, older, dark-skinned and blue eyed, strong enough to carry them both, all too happy to laugh out loud in a way that ridicules the silence of the crowd. They’re slipping on sets of gloves. The woman stoops over to tighten her shoelace.

The crowd parts. There’s a void between this tribe and the edge of the cliff. The Fireflies have stopped in their tracks. The girl settles down in a sprinter’s crouch, the boy and the others follow.

The winds have picked up. Em only just catches his words.

‘Okay. Day One…’ His smile is real…

The Fireflies explode into a run. Someone in the crowd cries out as they cross the empty space, right past Em. There’s a flash of colour, the sound of feet hitting the top rail, and then…

Everyone surges forward. And there, across the drop, are figures clinging to the flank of the obelisk. One by one they climb down the sheer face until they reach a great hole in the stonework, and disappear inside.

Em takes a long, deep breath. It’s only a jump away.

‘Em,’ her father calls, ‘come on, sweetheart, let’s go.’ He’s already climbing back up the stairs. ‘Em…?’

That morning, she tucked her own pair of gloves into a pocket. By the time he looks back, she’s slipped them on. By the time he asks her what she’s doing, she’s wrapped her arms around them both, stroking Katie’s cheek one more time.

‘I love you…’

It’s only a jump away. And she has to jump…because…

She turns and breaks into a sprint. One foot hits the railing. She jumps.


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here, at the end of their world, Em catches up.

Em’s foot catches at the railing and the world tilts beneath her and all at once she feels the cold stone of the obelisk rush to meet her. She is suspended there on the face, as if gravity has been arrested by the impact, before the earth begins to tease at her again. Another moment of desperation, of her throat turning to stone, before her fingers find a break and she’s holding on, trembling.

Somewhere beyond the wind that whips around her, Em can hear voices raised, indistinct. She can’t quite hear her father among them. It’s for the best. She dares herself to look down and sees the same gap the Fireflies climbed through. Em slowly crawls down, ignoring the sound of her own name, until she can slip through into the interior of the obelisk and the voices stop. There are stairs, here, thank god and she takes them three at a time.

From the ground floor, the marsh is wider. The smell is stronger, too. And now she can see the Fireflies in the distance. They’re already way ahead and they’re moving fast. Em takes off after them.

And her foot lodges in the mire. What seemed like a patch of grass shifts and sucks greedily at her leg. A cloud of insects rises up almost at once, stinging and biting at her until she flees back to the firm ground by the obelisk. Em swears, kicks off a fresh, stinking coat of mud from her shoe. The Fireflies are getting farther away.

‘… _Em_ …’

It’s still coming from on high.

Em takes off again, carefully. If you pay attention, there are safe places between, patches of bare earth drying out in the noonday sun. It doesn’t diminish the insects, though. Their bites are enough to encourage her to keep up her pace, as she keeps her eyes fixed on distant figures.

Her foot slips on an off-green patch of earth. A startled bird takes off from the waters nearby, with a cry of alarm like the roaring of an engine. Her hand catches at the tattered bark of a tree branch. Em sees one of the Fireflies stop, hears another call something and her heart skips a beat. But the pause is only momentary, and the Fireflies carry on until they reach the foundations of a ruined bridge.

Here, at the end of their world, Em catches up.

Beyond is a chasm so deep that no light can escape, cutting into the City as a dozen black rivers that carve their way through buildings older than recorded time. Em suddenly remembers how small she is.

She can hear the Fireflies talking now, indistinct; cut off the moment one of them catches her at the foot of their ruins. They’ve changed their clothes. Their old garments, sensible and brown and grey and white and clean and normal, have been thrown into a pile. Now they’re wearing canvas trousers, kneepads, thin shirts, hooded jackets, running shoes, and gloves. All patched and worn, items modified from charity. Better for travelling. Less modest. More than a few have their midriffs exposed. Em feels the heat rise in her neck.

‘You take a tumble, lady?’

Someone whistles. ‘Hey…hello?’ the girl from the edge is waving at her, head cocked like she’s talking to a lost dog.

‘No…’

‘You sure?’ The Fireflies aren’t talking and they don’t need to. Their smirks are enough.

‘I didn’t fall. I jumped.’

There’s a flash of respect in the girl’s eyes. ‘Brave. Stupid. Why?’

Em takes a deep breath. Part of her wishes she had her father behind her. ‘I want to be a Firefly.’ She’s expecting laughter, or an outright rejection. And the girl smiles and shakes her head like she wants to do both. But it’s the boy behind her, the other leader, who speaks first.

‘Twice in a month, Farro. Two strays in a month.’

The girl throws her hands up. ‘Okay, you win. Would you like to break her heart, or shall I?’

The boy grins at her. ‘Go on. You’re the gentle one.’

‘Cool.’ Farro clicks her fingers. ‘Let’s see that backpack, stray girl.’

Em can hear her shoes slapping against the ground, shaking off layers of mud as she closes the distance. She arches her shoulders and slips the backpack. Farro snatches it away, dumping it on the ground. Em can’t help cringing at the muffled crash of the contents. 

‘Stand still,’ Farro says, looking Em up and down, clicking her tongue at her climbing gloves, her mud-masked running shoes, her labourer’s shirt and trousers. ‘How much did all that cost you?’

Em had hidden a portion of every scrap she’d earned for two years. ‘It wasn’t much.’

‘Uh huh.’ Farro’s kneeling by her pack, flipping it open, bursts into laughter that peals off the nearest buildings of the City. The boy wanders over.

‘Seriously?’ He reaches in and produces one of the rations. ‘Canned food? You want to become a Firefly – a Firefly – and you bring canned food?’

‘How fast do you want to run? How much noise do you want to make? Don’t tell me it’s all like this…’

Farro stands, tips the pack over, watches as everything tumbles out. Em can’t stop herself from crying out as the lantern falls out last, hits the pile and skitters to a halt against the boy’s shoe.

They both stop laughing. Em realises that the boy is looking at her hands, which have curled into fists.

He picks up the lantern and its belt and holds them out to her. ‘Sorry.’

He folds his arms as soon as she grabs them and walks away. For a minute he and Farro speak in whispers with their backs to her, before, at last, he motions with a finger.

He digs into his own pack as Em draws closer. ‘Do you have a knife?’

‘No…’

He throws something to her, a small blade in a sheath made from scraps of cloth. ‘What about a rope? Gasmask?’

‘No…’ Again, both get thrown to her.

‘My name is Ludi. Lose those and I lose you.’ The boy stands, holding a canister in one hand. ‘Alright, come and get your colours.’

Em watches as the Fireflies come forward, dip their fingers into the tin and spread coloured paints across the bare places on their skin. Reds and blues, greens, yellows. Kingfisher colours, Uncle Peter once said. He forgot to tell Em why. She doesn’t take any paint herself, and none is offered.

They’re ready, and suddenly it all seems too fast. The rest is a blur. Ludi orders her to abandon everything she had brought but her lantern, her water canteen, the first aid kit and a few cans of food. By the time Em’s finished packing, she’s already taken too long. Farro is the only one left. The girl waits for her at the precipice. Suddenly it all seems too fast.

‘Come on, Stray!’

Em peeks over the lip. Nothing. There is absolutely nothing down there. The sunlight illuminates a line of ancient pillars, the crumbled supports of the fallen bridge that the Fireflies are already crawling over to reach the City. The sunlight shows these, and simply fails beyond. The nearest pillar is barely a drop. But around it is the black. Suddenly it all seems too fast…

‘Stop. Come here.’ Em lets herself be dragged away. Farro spins her around, digs into her pack and produces the lantern. ‘Firstly, never not be wearing this. Raise your arms.’

‘Never not…?’

‘I can’t work with pretty words, Stray.’ Farro fixes the belt around Em’s waist, adjusts the lantern so it sits at her hip.

Farro steps back to admire her work. And her heels are at the edge again.

‘Where are we going?’

‘We?’

‘You…’

Farro shrugs towards the City. ‘That way, genius, and there’s a place in there we like to hide. Come along if you’re brave.’ She grins. ‘It never hurts to grow a spine.’

And Farro is gone.

And quickly, Em follows.

 

Uncle Peter had two fingers on his left hand. He never told Em why and she never asked, but she would watch his ruined hand craft memory from firelight, changing shape as he drew it through the air. And in firelight and shadow touched by old memories, Em would see the City.

He told her that the City was vast. And he would tell of strange places buried in the depths of old towers, of parks growing wild and roads that stretched to the sky and wonders beyond anything man could even dream of making.

But her never told her how big it truly was.

Now Em stands at the far side of a chasm and sees the old towers rising up from the black to the sun like cold fingers to firelight. The sun is carved into fragments of grey and blue and black that fill the lost colours in the world around her. And the air is touched by a strange, shifting wind, which is at times freezing cold as shadows must be, but at others warm, humid like breath at your throat.

Em doesn’t look back towards the far cliffs. She doesn’t have time. The Fireflies are already running and she has to sprint to catch up. Now the world is close up, the horizons made of broken glass pressed into strange metal and a type of stone that Uncle Peter called _concree_. The buildings are strange shapes, too, and the walls are all jagged and run through with lines, the rooftops are steep like pyramids, windows are…the windows look like open mouths, but a hundred of them to an open surface and she can’t see the rooms behind them and she’s happy she can’t see anything looking out. Plants curve and curl around the old faces, obscuring all else. And as she follows the Fireflies, constantly lagging behind, she looks up and sees the sky carved up into straight blue lines, aligned with the black chasms below. Perhaps those dark places were streets but so far down that nobody could remember them.

Through the City, the Fireflies run. They climb. They jump. They fall.

Em had always thought of a journey as a straight line, but though the City is run through with straight lines, pathways and paved roads, the Fireflies never take them. Em finds herself scaling the sides of buildings and inching across old ledges with her toes dangling over a drop and sprinting across rooftops that groan under her feet and burying her fingers in trails of ivy to climb a low wall, feeling her heartbeat in her clenched teeth as she runs, jumps headlong off the edge of a building and feels the rush of a sudden warm updraft, catches a glimpse of below and sees nothing as she flies, falls towards the far side and hits solid ground, feeling the shape of it across her back as she rolls out of the landing like she’d practiced from the roof of her garden shed at home…

It feels good. She feels good. Em is almost disappointed when the Fireflies stop to rest. Some even appear to fall asleep. She watches Ludi and Farro argue over a map stitched together from old book pages.

‘You should sit down.’ There’s a girl stretching her leg against the flank of a monster carved from stone. ‘Catch your breath.’

Em suddenly realises how hard she’s panting. ‘No, it’s alright. I’m kind of enjoying the rush, you know?’ She feels herself smile. The girl only shakes her head.

‘You can help me out, at least.’ She promptly rests her leg on Em’s shoulder instead, contorting herself at the waist until they both hear a sudden pop from her knee.

‘Oh, at last!’ The girl flops to the ground, dragging Em with her. ‘A week on the fucking surface and everything stiffens up.’

‘How far have we-’ and Em’s throat locks in place, ‘the surface?’

‘A block, maybe two, I reckon. And yeah, the surface: the place where all the towns, villages and stupid people are?’

‘Oh, right…I’m Em, by the way.’

‘Song. And you’re _Stray_.’ She replies. ‘Wanna know why?’

Em was certain she didn’t want to know. She asks anyway. ‘Why?’

Song predictably rolls her eyes. ‘Because most Strays don’t survive their first week…can I have your watch?’

Again. ‘What?’

‘If you die, I mean.’   

For a moment, neither girl speaks.

‘Please?’

Em looks at her watch. Glow in the dark watches were a novelty back home, toys in a place where the streets were lit at night. It suddenly seems more important to keep it.

And it is getting dark. It is only two o’clock, but the high towers of the city, tall enough to brush past the clouds, are now blocking the path of the sun itself. Song curses. Em looks down to see her struggling with the lantern at her side.

As if on cue, Ludi speaks up.

‘Night’s coming. Lanterns on.’

Em had practiced this before, in Uncle Peter’s shack, under the uninterrupted light from a fireplace, or the sun itself. But noon has already become dusk, and dusk is getting darker. Her fingers fumble at the lantern, opening the hatch in the side as she takes one of the pyramid-shaped lumps – chemical salts – and drops it-

Around her, other lanterns are coming to life, hissing and crackling, blossoming into blue points of light.

‘Hurry up, _Stray_ …’ comes a warning voice. Em shuts the hatch and struggles to find the pilot, finds it at last, a key-shaped knob at the top of the lantern. She pushes it in, twists. There’s a long, low hiss. And then, light.

Em can see everything clearer than day: the Fireflies, the rooftop she stands on, and the face of every tower nearby. Farro comes closer. It’s too bright to see her expression.

‘Turn it down…’ Em twists the knob, dragging in the glow around her until her lantern seems as dim as the others.

 

Uncle Peter lived alone in a shack he built himself, some way out of the village. Nobody helped him. Few people even mentioned his name, and they’d only talk to him if he spoke first. But Em would visit every other week, and when her father took them away from March Edge for a new life in the village, she’d visit every day.

He told her that the City was strange. And he would whisper of streets where shining ghosts would wander, of the Toy Apes and Tom-Shadow and the call of scarcely seen birds which nested in ruins high above.

But he never told her how it felt to see it all.

The City is alive. It breathes. The air is filled with the smell of it, old and savage, like rotting wood and panic sweat. The ruined places that once held life hold it still, and though no one who built that place still walks the streets, the bottle-green ants cling to the leaves of a bush and sting the ones who draw too close, the air is filled with the clicking of beetle wings and a sudden flight of bats that startle some twisted mountain goat that leaps on four legs between window ledges and roars rather than bleats, and in the dark she watches the streaks of feral cats dance around hunting invisible prey.

Even in the night that falls too fast, life carries on. Flowers bloom in the dark and draw in luminescent bees with the scent of burning oil. Em watches something crawl around in a shopfront, picking up broken glass with delicate paws before it catches her looking and slithers away.

‘You should get some sleep.’ Song has her head buried in the crook of her arm. Em looks around and sees the other Fireflies settling in, using backpacks or friendly shoulders to prop themselves up.

‘We’re stopping for the night?’ Em asks. Finally. Only Ludi seems awake, perched on a pile of masonry with a short-nosed rifle in his hands. She can’t remember seeing him with it before.

 ‘ _Night_ is twenty-eight hours,’ she replies. ‘We’ll get ten minutes before we have to start moving again…’

Ludi whistles through his teeth. Song jerks her head up like she’s been stirred from a deep sleep, while Em struggles to remember what ten minutes feels like. Even the thought takes too long. A stone bounces off her shoulder. ‘Wake up!’

‘Told you…’ whispers Song.

‘Yeah…’ And then another thought occurs to her. ‘Song, where are we going?’

But Song doesn’t answer. And Em travels on, lagging behind a tireless pack of half-wild children, a snake of burning stars, or guttering chemical lanterns, streaming deeper into the wilderness of the night darkened City. A few blocks further on, the green becomes a forest – a sideways, lopsided forest that grows on the sheer faces of skyscrapers and clung as vines to the bridges that spanned the black between those towers like streamers at some forgotten party. Fairly soon, the Fireflies are forced into walking, taking turns leading the pack and hacking and slashing their way through the growth.   

Uncle Peter told her that the City was strange, but strange escapes Em until her third day in.

Her third break… Em hadn’t looked at her watch, and now that they stop and start in bursts she barely has time to count. The watch face no longer makes any sense. It’s seven o’clock of…what day is it? What time of day?

Her third day in is when she realises how a strange life is easier to live then it is to explain. It’s dangerous, too. They finally break through a dense patch of forest, to a space clear enough to run again. It seems like an open square, with grass barely knee high, and it’s blood red. All of a sudden, Farro is hissing at the Fireflies around her, rushing for Em and pressing her into the nearest wall. From on high comes a sudden chatter, and screeching and howling unlike anything Em has ever heard. Above, in the skeleton-bare tops of the building, shadows dance. Large, hairy shadows, with heads that look slightly off, as if they were too big, or… Slowly, with Farro and Ludi acting as shepherds, the Fireflies flee the square and creep for seems like miles, years, until they cannot hear the sound of the Doll Apes any more.

Strange as it is, Em receives her second lesson that same day. She finds it in a City block that has all but collapsed. One building – a cathedral – stands half in ruins, with a fallen skyscraper nestled in its guts. There’s something unusual, here. A big sign, with the picture of a woman painted on it. Not painted, but stuck there, somehow. Em can see part of her body, the bright colours shining out like a scar in the lichen that covers the rest of her. The woman’s now a bridge for the Fireflies, albeit one that they take like trained acrobats as each step makes a metal-on-metal groan.

It’s halfway across that Em hears the noise, feels the blast of an updraft. Somewhere in the distance comes the sound of paper caught in a gust of wind. A flutter that becomes a cacophony-

‘Hold on!’

Without asking why, Em drops into a crouch and digs her fingers into the lichen. And suddenly, she is caught in a flock of paper birds.

Paper birds. Like a child would cut from a scrap, but cut from clean colours, reds, blues, wings and heads and tails all twitching as if they were alive. They are alive. Caught in the middle of the rush, Em feels them brush against her, soft as the eddies in a river, their rustling almost a whisper.

And then they are gone. Em suddenly realises how high up she is, regains her balance long enough to cross to the other side. Ludi helps her down with a nod.

She did something right, though she’s not sure what she did.

‘Well done,’ Farro says. ‘Any other fool would try to catch one as they went by.’

 

Uncle Peter was the one good thing about moving to the village. He disappeared one day, but he left behind the key to his old shack. Em would still go pretending he was still there, and she’d light the fireplace like he did, crushing chemical salts against her boot heel and kicking the fresh sparks into the coals.

He had told her that life in the City was hard. And he spoke of short days and long nights where the day was a spark and the night was the dark of an empty room, and the way the journey would make your legs ache long after it was over.

But her never told her all the small things. That great hardships are easy to face alone, that it’s all the small hurts you gain from facing it, the ones that start to wear you down. It takes four days to wear the City into Em. The gloves were a good idea, but even they aren’t enough. Shards of glass, or metal, or stinging plants, or stinging bugs cover every surface of the City, and even with the gloves her hands start to look like a patchwork. And her legs are aching, but not in any promising way. She counts bruises everywhere. She is always hungry, because Fireflies will not risk a fire to cook anything. They eat dried foods, crushed packets of noodles or bars that taste like wood chips. She lives on cold cans of soup.

Em does not enjoy feeling like herself. But she can feel the marks on her skin. And deeper, she can hear her own thoughts clearly for the first time in years, unbidden and almost unwanted. The City is infinite. Beautiful, endless. Quiet, except during the short day, when for a few hours every living creature sings, desperate to be heard before night comes and they turn to hunting instead. And every still tower, still house, still park, endless and empty chasm turns the wide world into an echo chamber. For voices, or movements, or the old song Em keeps looping through her head.

‘Stray! Wake up! Do you need a bedtime story, too?’

It’s Farro, again. Farro is her keeper, her guide and a constant pain in her ass. Em has already counted four days with only blinks passing for sleep, and yet she seems the only one hindered by it. Every time she tries for something deeper it’s a kick or a rock or more abuse.

 

The sun sets beyond the chimneystack of a factory, shining out one last time as it peeks through the empty windows and is seen no more. It is the end of the fourth day and the beginning of the fifth night and Em gives in. She gives in. And to Uncle Peter’s credit, she admits it was the same amount of time he gave her, though he said it with a smile on his face.

Em’s giving in does not come with her punching Ludi in the nose, as she had been fantasising for some time. It comes with a rest break, when she mutters:

‘Fuck it…’

It’s a cold wind that wakes her. Em is alone.

 

 


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Em is alone, and she can’t understand why.

Chapter Three

 

Em is alone, and she can’t understand why. Sleep makes her lips freeze in place, before her brain fully comprehends the frantic beating of her heart.

…is alone.

She jumps to her feet and the lantern springs free of her belt, skittering across the floor and leaving grazes in the lichen. She chases it, skidding to one knee as she clutches it to her chest. She can see there’s still daylight, so it’s still day in the City. Which means she fell asleep only a few minutes ago. Or hours. Her heart skips. How many hours in a day, down here?

‘There are twenty-eight hours of night in the City.’ Em whispers to herself, and every hiss comes back as an echo. ‘A day in the real world…surface, is…was...fuck, it’s thirty-three hours. That’s five hours.’ Em claps a hand to her eyes and chokes back laughter. She’s terrified, alone in a place supposedly filled with death, and only now she realises how many hours she’s had without real sleep.

The world around her comes into focus.

Farro chose this place for the Fireflies to rest in, said it was all but impossible for them to be ambushed. They spent the time on some sort of support. The building around them had collapsed long ago, leaving a vast, empty sea of open air around them. There was one way across and that was by a length of fallen cable as thick as a house back h…back on the surface.

It was hard enough to do last night, but Em finds it even harder when the sun’s rays can’t reach the bottom of the drop around her. She makes it to the other side and grips to the bricks for dear life. Her left palm sticks.

There’s an arrow freshly graffitied on the wall. And another few metres way, on the corner of another building. Dumbly, Em goes to it. To the next. She follows the trail left for her until she comes to a place where all the buildings press together, and the only way forward is by a single chasm between two of them. There’s a street below, solid ground, but it’s so far down. It’s louder here, too. It shouldn’t be. She hears no birdsong, no cracking or groaning of old walls or the crackling of undergrowth. Just the wind.

And then Em sees her.

At the far end of the chasm, on the roof of the opposite building, Farro is sitting and smoking a pipe. Watching Em.

Em darts forward, makes the jump to the nearest building without thinking, finds herself stopping short, limp, catching madly at the edge and holding with her fingertips.

Hanging before her is a silver thread.

For a second, Em wonders why she stopped. But then, it dawns on her again that it might just be how much it looks like a spider’s thread. Pulling herself under it and pressing to a thin ledge, she sees a dozen more like it, some floating gently on the stiff, cold breeze blowing through the chasm, others strung out like train cables between the two buildings.

A breath catches in her lungs when she sees how each free thread snakes back to the wall, meeting with others on the way, forming a wall that glitters with dew, forming a funnel woven into a window frame and the shadows beyond. Spider’s thread, spider’s web… Em looks up to the far end. She can’t see Ludi anywhere, there’s only Farro, watching Em intently as she holds a lit match to her pipe and exhales a plume of smoke. She seems content.

Em doesn’t look forward again. She looks ahead, forcing herself not to stare at the hole in the wall as she slowly inches along the ledge. The breeze picks up suddenly and she has to contort herself to avoid another thread as it drifts her way. She can see forms in the web, bundles wrapped up tight and buried in the silk around the funnel, some tiny, others almost the size of a human being. She can almost make out some of the shapes…

She’s felt something pull on her leg, and looks down to see her toe brushing against a thread. She eases her foot away. It’s still twitching.

There’s something there, in the funnel. Four legs of a spider arch out from the centre of the hole, unmoving, like they’d always been there. But Em’s heart has stopped some time ago, back at the beginning, so now she just feels slightly colder. She steps over the thread, so focussed on the thing in front of her that she loses her balance and almost catches on another without thinking. There’s another balcony ahead, mercifully free of the web. Em plays with the idea of going inside the building. She tests the handle of the door before her and finds the thing unlocked. She could go. But something tells her that worse things might hide inside. At least out here, she can see it coming. She returns to the ledge, and freezes again. The spider hasn’t moved, though. It’s just her imagination.

Or…there. There’s something else moving, far below, on the street that was empty only a moment ago. A man. Something that looks like a man. The sunlight reflects off its skin, catching on the streaks of rust that run across the metal. A pair of glass lenses, the thing’s eyes stare up at her. Em knows what this is. She’s seen it in her mind, in a hundred of Uncle Peter’s stories. This is a machine. It looks like a human. She can’t remember him telling her that.

The thing looks harmless, though as she starts to slide across the wall it follows her, gazing up all the while as it walks down the street like an aimless passerby watching a piece of paper float in the wind. She’s nearly there. One more balcony, one more stretch of wall, and she can jump to the other side. She looks down at the machine again. It’s looked away, towards something in the distance. Em shakes her head and presses on, but the sudden stillness of her follower has her more disturbed than it was walking after her.

She can hear birdsong. It’s getting louder. Closer.

The machine looks back up at her.

She can’t help but whisper. ‘Fuck…’ She starts to shimmy faster along the wall, even as the distant echoes gain clarity. A flock of birds wheel around the corner, flying blindly into the chasm. Em throws herself into the last balcony. Tumbles to the far side. She jumps back on the to ledge and the flock passes by and a few birds blunder into the drifting thread.

A spider springs out of the hole and slams through the flock into the wall beside her. Em is barely a pinprick against its size. Birds panic and blunder into webbing, into errant threads as the others shriek an alarm. Her hand catches a web. Her foot catches another. The spider pauses midway through wrapping up a bird and extends a cautious feeler in her direction.

It’s only a run to the edge. Em bites her lip and draws blood as she forces herself to move still slowly.

She feels the thread on her foot twitch.

The spider twitches in turn.

Em runs.

She feels the thread snap, feels a rush of air as the spider surges forward. Em jumps off the edge, feels the crosswind drag at her body, hits the rooftop, rolls, comes to her feet and trips over, landing flat on her front and driving the air from her ribs.

 

Farro hasn’t moved. She’s still sitting at the edge of the roof, smoking her pipe as though she’d actually been watching the spider all along. ‘So, you met Carol. How’s the old girl doing these days?’

The air surges back into Em’s lungs. ‘You knew there was a spider there?’

‘Did all the spray-painted arrows not clue you in?’

‘You left me behind!’

‘Technically, you chose to stay behind.’

‘Chose?’ Em can feel a loose tile beneath her foot and she has to force herself not to throw it at the back of Farro’s head. ‘I could have died!’

‘No!’ Farro stands up and whirls about to face Em. ‘You were never in danger of that, not unless you did something really stupid. Ask me why.’

‘Why-’

‘Because everyone gets one.’

And Farro points back towards the chasm. Ludi is standing on top of one of the buildings with what looks like a flare gun, with a clear line of sight over the whole scene. He starts sliding down a drainpipe.

‘Stray, look at me.’ Farro clicks her fingers. ‘That, right there, was your one chance to do something stupid and not die. You just used it. Just like the others used theirs.’

Em can feel the other Fireflies staring holes into the back of her skull. ‘I…’ She can’t think of anything. ‘Wait. I fell asleep? Is that-’

‘You fell asleep!’ Farro’s voice is breaking into a shout and Em can hear it travel halfway across the City. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, Stray, there are things in the dark! Sleep doesn’t hide them.’

 ‘But why do that to me…?’

Ludi drops on to the rooftop, shoving the flare gun in his belt. ‘You survived. You learnt. You live. And frankly, Stray, most other tribes would have left you behind from the first. We didn’t. We even waited for you.’

 ‘The nearest way to the surface is in that direction.’ Farro nods back towards Carol’s web. ‘But if you’re coming with us, you’re living the way we do.’

The Fireflies are gathered on a ledge just above Em. Farro and Ludi go to join them.

‘What about that thing on the street?’ She doesn’t quite know why she said it, but both of them pause. Farro looks back towards her, Ludi to the street below. It’s still standing there, staring up at Em, at the Fireflies, like they were all toys in a shop window.

 ‘It’s just a machine.’ Farro says. ‘Keep up, Stray.’

They start running.

Em follows.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s hard to see the world. Hard to breathe, which just seems wrong. Em sees through fogged glass. She breathes through a charcoal filter. She wonders why the Fireflies have painted faces on their gas masks. Everybody’s become a monster, the colours roughly scraped against the rubber to form sharp teeth and patterned skins, which now seem to glow in the shade.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry for the wait, guys! Thank you for all your lovely comments and for being so patient <3

 

‘They’re lost.’

Em has stopped counting days. Or distance. Both are too hard to do unless you waste energy thinking about it. She does try hard to think less, but not thinking at all is impossible. And the fact that Ludi and Farro are bent double over their map has her worried, because they’ve only done it twice since...

‘Wake up, Em.’

‘I’m not asleep.’ Em doesn’t sleep. She blinks. She’s getting used to blinking for prolonged periods of time, and somehow the fear of getting left behind wakes her up better than any eight hours. But oddly, it doesn’t stop her from dreaming.

‘They’re lost,’ she says again.

‘They’re not lost. They’re arguing.’ Song replies at length. ‘Can I have a bite of that?’

Em remembers the ration lying half-open at her side. ‘You want a can of congealed corned beef?’

‘“A can of congealed corned beef” is the only thing I can say while drunk. So yes, I want a bite.’

‘Take it.’ Em slumps on to her back. The Fireflies had paused on a train platform filled with cold metal benches. They were covered with the remnants of things, of broken glass and rags turned blue with mould. Most had bugs living in them. They were the first seats they’d come across. It was heaven.

Song eats with her fingers. ‘Those two don’t get lost. They get diverted or distracted, or dissuaded, or some other D-word.’

‘So what then?’

‘If I know them, they’re arguing about, um, Detouring, to that building there.’ Song points with a handful of corned beef. Em wipes the flecks off her cheek and follows the gesture out from the train platform and across the street to a tower on the far side, standing in full view of the sun. It rises up from a garden of tall trees, its face still filled with windows stained with green, touched in places with white marble that shows like bones under skin beneath the reds and greys and browns of the ruin. A few letters still cling to one side: A, D, I, N, E. It’s like a name. Do buildings have names?

‘Alright, fine!’ comes a shout Ludi, making everybody jump. ‘We’ll do it your way. If you win…’ He walks over to the edge of the platform, scooping up a rock from the edge.

‘Can’t we just assume I will?’ Farro catches it as she follows him over.

Ludi doesn’t hear her. ‘And if you lose, you have to sing the “Ludi is Right” song,’ he says.

‘I’ve never had to sing the “Ludi is Right” song…’ Farro replies. ‘Guns up!’

And Em is suddenly aware of the variety of guns a Firefly can possess. Some aren’t even carrying guns. Song is holding an axe, and the half-blunt knife Ludi gave to Em seems like a sharp splinter compared to the machete the boy beside her is wielding.

Ludi is half mumbling some half tune, the contents of which relate to Farro being a loser. She pokes her tongue out at him and throws the stone like a mortar shell. A window shatters in the old building, and in the greened over windows the broken hole looks like a void.

Everyone tenses up, and Em waits in silence and stupidly wonders why.

‘Your turn.’ Farro says a minute later.

Ludi isn’t half as good. The rock disappears into the park, breaking a rotten tree limb and no more.

Another minute of silence, and: ‘I win.’

‘I hate you.’

 

It’s hard to see the world. Hard to breathe, which just seems wrong. Em sees through fogged glass. She breathes through a charcoal filter. She wonders why the Fireflies have painted faces on their gas masks. Everybody’s become a monster, the colours roughly scraped against the rubber to form sharp teeth and patterned skins, which now seem to glow in the shade.

The building rises up against them. Lamplight replaces sunlight, though streams of the real thing still creep in through the gaps, half-stifled by dust. At the doorway, fresh graffiti, a stencil of a monkey holding a gear. Others pause to look at it, but Song only shakes her head and walks on.

This place is, was, a store. A large store. She follows the Fireflies into a hall the size of March Edge, walls like a honeycomb, riddled with open fronts, filled with old relics. One store has a set of mannequins, some still half-wearing the remains of clothing. There’s a painting of a woman in a dotted skirt, almost peeled away. And high above them, clinging to the wall and leaning out like a diver, the head and shoulders of a man. These things all look human-shaped, almost, and seeing that calms her, though she can’t say why.

‘Window shopping?’ Comes a voice all hollow sounding. Ludi’s gas mask is a clown’s painted grin, and the glowing teeth shine out at Farro.

Farro kicks at a suitcase, scattering the moth-eaten contents over the floor. There are trails in the dust around her, footprints of other people. Her mask has seven eyes and two noses and two scowling mouths. ‘I don’t like picking up after someone else.’   

‘Why are we here?’ Song has been at Em’s side the whole way, and Em has felt the question pushing at the seams of her. She points back to the stencil. ‘Somebody’s already been and looted the place.’

The other Fireflies murmur in agreement beneath their gasmasks, their muffled voices almost a hum. 

‘Ren has been here,’ says Farro, staring at something in the distance. ‘And the answer is that Ren likes shiny things, and assumes that they are the only things of value in the world. Much like others in his situation, Ren is a moron.’ She digs the point of her toe into one of the foreign footprints. ‘Question answered?’

Without another word, Ludi turns and wanders off in a random direction, hands momentarily flailing at his sides until he realises that his pockets are already full.

‘And I agree.’ He shouts to nobody in particular. The Fireflies have already scattered, like dust in the air. ‘Come along Stray. You too, Song.’    

He wanders down a passage at random, into a corridor lined with shopfronts, scattered with broken glass, ruined things too rotten to distinguish, old signs painted with spots of lichen and mould and letters she recognises and words she can’t understand. Em sees a door painted with the image of a person, a woman. Maybe? She reaches out to touch it, and its cheek comes away on her fingertips.

‘They were human. Just in case you wanted to know.’ Ludi stops by one door, opens it and steps through like the window wasn’t caved in long ago.

‘Here?’

‘No. The City. It was built by humans,’ he says. ‘I know people think different on the surface.’

Em had been to Church. They did. ‘I don’t.’

‘I hope so.’ He walks through the store as if someone else is watching him, glancing at displays no longer there, walking behind the counter and pausing by a metal box run through with metal buttons.

‘Most people assume the place was run by _Aleens_ , or whatever, which is probably why they look at our kind like we’re wildlife. Do you know what this is, Stray?’

‘No.’

‘No do I.’ He picked up the machine and threw it into the wall behind him. Beyond the hole of caved-in plaster were wires and dark steel boxes, which Ludi ripped out and stuffed into his backpack. ‘But they depend on us. We’re the only reason they have electric light, let alone anything else…’

‘…like _Kafei_. Did you know he discovered _Kafei_?’ Song breaks the rhythm of his voice.

‘Seriously?’ Em tries to remember the taste, but not the face across the table.

‘Delicious, right?’

‘It’s shit.’

Ludi bursts out laughing. ‘Yeah, I know. And for the record, I only suffered _Kafei_. I lost a bet and had to eat a handful of beans. Had the shits for a day, couldn’t sleep for a week and when I brought it to the University, they gave me a pat on the shoulder and took all the glory for themselves.’

He kicks another hole in the wall. ‘But we’re not after herbs. Or gold. Just tech, precious things like copper wire, or electrical boxes, or any box filled with wires that you can carry at a sprint…’

And for an hour they scramble through the dust, the each one always in sight of the other, and they work with an eye on Em’s watch as they loot their way down the corridor, kicking open walls to find precious copper wire, nudging at boxes with their toe to scare out strange insects with shifting, shining backs nested among old toys.

They break what they can’t carry. There are no stories in things that were once precious, because the people that held them as something precious are so far gone that nobody can remember their name, let alone their memories.

Em copies the others, finds a large, dusty standing clock and pulls it over and there’s a sound like the sky is falling. Coins mix with glass shards and gears shaped like snowflakes and pour from the wound in the cracked clock face to dance and scatter out across the floor. ‘Ludi!’

The boy jogs over. ‘Nice find, Stray.’ He digs into the pile, pushing aside the coins to pluck a few stray gears from the pile, before caving in the rest of the clock face to tear out the parts within. On afterthought, he picks up a coin and tosses it to Em.

‘There’s a souvenir.’

 

A sharp whistle rattles the dust motes.

Ludi and Song freeze in place. A second whistle sets Em’s teeth on edge. They sprint towards the source, back into the vast hall where the tribe is already gathering. Farro grabs at Ludi’s arm, lifts her gasmask to hiss something in his ear.

Em feels the mood turn ugly, and the Fireflies are forming into a pack. She hears the sound of footsteps coming from the entrance. 

‘Can we help you?’

There’s a boy in the doorway. He walks in, a tribe of strangers flowing in around him, none of them wearing gasmasks. He looks like a wreck, buried in a tattered overcoat stained with red and yellow dye, twisted face bearing a broken nose, an ugly black mark covering one cheek and distorting a smile. He’s older than the other Firefles, maybe nineteen or so. ‘…cause you know there are rules, right?’

Ludi pushes his gasmask up. ‘Where? Farro, did you know there were rules?’

‘Uh, yeah? They gave us a big pamphlet when we signed up to Firefly School,’ says Farro. ‘Don’t you remember? It was around the same time we found out that there was no such thing as Firefly School.’

‘We never did get our money back.’

‘How you doing, Ren?’

The boy scratches at his neck. ‘Farro. And Ludi. The geniuses. Totally missed my tag out the front, did you?’

‘Oh, yeah, we saw it,’ says Farro. ‘We decided to ignore it.’

‘It’s my tag, my claim.’

‘ _Claim_? What claim?’ Ren and Farro and Ludi meet halfway across the floor, the two tribes coalescing around them. Em can’t help but feel like she’s about to fight the boy opposite her. He keeps making faces.

Ren’s a full foot taller than anyone else around him. He’s already squaring up to Farro. ‘This place is ours.’

‘Bullshit. There’s nothing that says we can’t loot here again.’

‘Says who, dumbass?’

‘Says every Firefly since the first one jumped, dumbass.’

‘Watch it, Ludi. I’ve already kicked your arse, once.’

Farro drops her pack, and everyone else around Em follows suit. ‘Yep. Because we told everyone you didn’t know how to tie your shoelaces. Did you guys know he can’t tie his shoelaces?’

‘You know what? Let’s settle this properly.’

The boy is still making faces at Em. She has no idea why. Or why the others around him are sniggering.

‘…so what? We having a War?’

Someone jostles her in the ribs.

‘We’ve only got half an hour of daylight, though…’

Song punches her in the arm. ‘Take your mask off…’ she whispers through gritted teeth. She’s the only one still wearing a gasmask. Em feels the heat rise around her neck.

‘…fists only. Winner keeps the loot…’

She didn’t even pay attention to the painting on her mask. Some fool painted a cat’s face over the top. The sniggering turns to laughter. The boy opposite her puffs his chest out. ‘You guys took on a Stray?’ he says.

‘…and never talks shit about the other again…’

‘Hey, lady, you a Stray? Nice outfit, Stray. Perfect for the City. They find you at a tea party?’

‘…sounds like a deal…’

‘Nah, she was protesting outside your sister’s brothel,’ Song breaks in. The Fireflies around her start laughing.

The boy turns bright red. ‘You’re sticking up for the Stray, now?’

‘…going to enjoy this…’

‘I thought you guys were sad. Scooping up whatever real tribes leave behind…guess that had to mean all the rejects, too.’ He scores a lame point, but his friends are laughing with him anyway. The boy nods to Em. ‘Sorry, Stray. I’m sure back on the surface you were mummy’s little angel. Even if she couldn’t stand-’

Em collides with him, not caring what flying part of her connects, so long as it leaves a scar. She only just hears Ludi’s shout:

‘Fuck it. War!’

And the world is a place of king hits and kicks to the guts.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boy is stronger than Em, larger too, but she keeps him pinned with bee-sting punches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience, everyone. I hope you enjoy!

 

Arms whirling the grain - the sudden taste of salt between teeth and tongue and the worm of a boy she’s pinned under one knee is trying to hit her again. The boy is stronger than Em, larger too, but she keeps him pinned with bee-sting punches. She barely hears the sound of War being played out by the children around her, Fireflies turning over and around and meeting with the sound of skin on skin and the sudden crack of skin on a bone and a howl of pain and several voices rising up all at once and breaking into grunts and curses.

She can almost hear a savage cry somewhere.

A slap to the ear makes her head ring. Em balls a fist and draws blood as she catches the boy square on the nose.

There’s another cry, more savage, more animal.

The boy struggles beneath her.

Other cries…

Em feels her ribcage shift sideways, feels herself wrapped up in arms burning with sweat as a girl tackles her off her captive punching bag. Slick green tiles leave a trail where the two of them struggle.

‘Stop…’

She hears the boy struggle to his feet with a hiss of air. He’s storming towards her. The other Firefly has her arm locked.

‘Everybody stop!’

Ren has backed away from Farro, a crescent of blood forming around a split lip. He’s holding an open palm in front of him, but Farro doesn’t make another move, both of them standing still and silent in place.

‘Does anyone else hear that?’

Em can. The War has become quiet enough. And the cries she mistook for battle were coming from somewhere else entirely.

Now they can all hear it. A chorus of chattering, snarling, howls and screeches, growing louder and louder until, unmistakably, they are joined by the sound of vegetation and masonry splintering beneath a hundred warm bodies.

Nobody makes a sound. Nobody moves. The cacophony seems to surround them, and through a thin portal of light cast by some high window come shadows reeling in. For what feels like forever, they are frozen there, watching the sunlight flicker as the chaos passes over.

Then, all too quickly, silence again.

Ludi comes to his feet.

‘Okay…’

A loud thump. A cascade of plaster and dust from the ceiling high above. It falls in soft waves, first rippling from one end, then suddenly sweeping to a place just above the head of the statue of the diving man. Thump, thump, thump. There’s a quiet hooting noise, almost plaintive. Lonely. Then it rises in pitch, becomes faster, angrier. A cloud falls over them. Over Em. The thumping becomes rhythmic, fast.

She can hear Song. ‘Stray…’

The noise about becomes a screech. A scream. A creak. Above her, a fracture forms in the ceiling. Em begins to struggle, but the girl holding her is stupefied, mute and clinging. The fracture becomes a crack.

‘Em, move!’

Em watches the ceiling slowly open like a hanging jaw. She can’t move. Song runs over to her, tears the girl away.

The space above is filled with dust and broken plaster, splintered wood, and black limbs. Em rolls to her feet, stumbles forward. And the floor beneath her caves in.

 

 

There’s a moment like she’s jumped from the edge all over again. Like gravity forgets her. But her shoulder strikes something. She’s falling, spun in the air. Landing, hard.

Em is lying on her side, and at first she can’t feel a thing. Then, pain, but not overwhelming. She can breathe, though breathing comes shallow and forced at first. But as she rolls on to her back it becomes easier, and she can see a ragged ring of light above her and faces that become clearer as her head stops spinning.

‘Stray!’ comes a voice. Song is hanging over the edge, her fingers knotted between splinters of wood and stone. The circle of light is a man-sized hole in the ceiling above. ‘Say something!’

How far did she fall? ‘I’m okay…’ Em slowly pulls herself up, wrapping her arms around one knee to make a cradle for her aching head, breathing deep to stop her heart from racing. The air stinks, acrid and sweet all at the same time.

‘What is that?’ Another voice.

She looks around her. The light from the hole above her falls upon piles of clothing, rotten wooden boxes, rows of rusted tables each bearing strange machines.

‘Stray! Stray, look at me!’ She can see Ludi beside Song. ‘Stay still. Okay?’ His voice has lowered to a whisper. Song has gone pale. A dozen other heads appear, looking down at her. Looking down. Looking behind her.

Something shifts in the dim. Em wants to look, but she still can’t see clearly. Her vision is swimming. What is that smell? Her lantern has gone out. She mutely fumbles with impact-numbed fingers at the catch.

‘Somebody throw me a fucking rope!’

The thing behind her is moving again.

‘Stray, don’t-!’

Em turns around.

A massive thing of hair, red-black, the colour of old blood on rusted iron, formless in shape until an arm slowly flexes and six fingers with six broken claws drag long bloody marks across the floor, and a deep cough shakes its shoulders. Through blurred vision, Em is seeing a childhood nightmare. Or else…

Nothing’s wrong with her vision. It’s with the air…and she can’t light the lantern, now…

‘I got it.’ Ren is standing above her, a rifle in his hands, taking aim.

Em comes to her feet. ‘Stop!’ A little too loud. The creature shudders. She forces herself to whisper: ‘Gas!’

Ren freezes in place. Ludi tears the rifle from his hands.

The creature shudders, grows in size. No, it isn’t growing. It’s getting up.

A rope flies over the edge, snaking down through the dim towards Em. It’s too late. Em disappears beneath one of the tables, pressing herself into the tangle of the machinery there, watching the creature contort, contract, muscle upon muscle rippling under mounds of fur.

The thing before her now crouches on all fours, knuckles pressed against the ground and hunched over like a lonely soul. It hoots softly to itself, looks up full into the light. It’s wearing a doll’s head, like one from a child’s toy, forced crudely over it’s own. The doll doesn’t quite fit – a lower jaw lined with broken teeth grinds against the rubber chin. 

She has met this thing before, in the stories told by a man who isn’t there. Uncle Peter had called it a Toy Ape.

Em wants to panic. But instead her fingers find the gasmask clipped to her belt. Breathing comes easier. Sight, too. There, at the far end of the room, the ceiling has fallen in. There’s space above. Escape. Em begins to crawl towards it, sheltered beneath the row of tables, slithering out, over, through the rust that hangs beneath them like spilled organs.

She looks back and sees the Ape toying with the rope. It must not have seen the people above. Or they’ve run away.

Her foot slips. Something crashes to the floor behind her.

The floor shakes under massive feet, like a drum roll. Em dives. The Ape is above her, past her, flipping over the table she was just beneath. It can’t see. It can’t see. She was right there and it missed her. But it can hear, feel. Smell? She hears it huffing at the stale air.

Em moves on all fours, fingers pressed into the cushion of rot that covers the floor.

She’s getting close. Closer.

The Ape is just behind her, sniffing at mould-soaked clothes.

She’s made it. There’s a desk, half fallen in with the rest of the ceiling, half hanging from the floor above. She wishes she had time to use a rope but the Ape is moving away and she wants out and fear is making her stupid. Em reaches out to the desk. Slowly begins to climb. The desk shifts under her weight.

The Ape freezes. Em does, too. But the ceiling above begins to shudder and everything’s giving way beneath her. She has a choice in this second, to stay below or risk the climb. Em makes her decision. The desk is slipping and the Ape is breaking into a run, not even pausing for all the obstacles in its way, turning everything to splinters and clouds.

Em takes flight. The desk falls, crashes to the floor, through it into the darkness below and the Ape is going insane but she’s made it, she’s made it and she’s running and jumping for the highest thing she can see when the world beneath her explodes.

The Ape turns the place into shrapnel. It howls at the darkness around it. But it doesn’t find her. If it reached out it would feel her shivering. But it doesn’t find her.

Em clings to a rafter just above. She feels a century pass in breathless silence.

It leaves. Body contorted and heaving with exhaustion and unfulfilled rage, the Ape settles on its haunches, huffs once, and shuffles away.

It’s going. She’s safe. She’s…

She hears someone whisper. So does the Ape. The others. The Fireflies are still up there, and the Ape is looking up into the light and the doll’s head is shining wet and the teeth are grinding, hungry…

They’re all in danger.

Em makes a second stupid decision. She lowers herself to the floor, slides over into the blackness of the nearest wall and picks up the nearest piece of rubble. She throws it. It drops into the hole she just escaped. It hits everything on the way, and she hopes it doesn’t make a spark.

She holds her breath. The Ape lunges for the sound, tumbles into the hole after the false prey.

And then she runs.

The light is just ahead, and hanging in the motes of dust is the rope.

She has it.

The Ape has her.

She feels a set of claws drag at the air beneath her feet. The rope drags her sideways, slams her into the side of the hole. But she’s still holding on, and driven insane the Ape has missed. It’s hit the ground. She’s climbing. She can hear it leaping up the sides of the hole after her.

‘Stray!’ There’s someone in the light.

It’s Farro, it’s Farro and she’s reaching out for Em and Em seizes at the hand like she was drowning. Farro’s pulling her up, Em is halfway out, but the Ape is right there and she can feel the breath of it on her legs.

There. At Farro’s hip. The flare gun. Em grabs for it, nearly pulling Farro into the hole.

‘Hey! What the fuck-?’ The flare gun is in Em’s hand and she is looking down the barrel into a nightmare of fur and teeth and claws and rubber skin and she pulls the trigger.

There’s a sound like the hissing of an engine. There’s a scream that splits her head. Light. Heat. The open air. And suddenly, Em is looking through soot-stained glass and her ears are ringing.

 

A warm body at her side. Someone else is propping her up, pulling off her gas mask.

‘Hey, you alive?’ They’re patting her cheek. Em shakes them away, passes a hand over her eyes.

She’s looking up at Song, Farro is lying at her side and Ludi is on his knees between them both. Em looks around at a sea of stunned faces, at a plume of smoke rising up from a hole in the floor some five metres away. ‘Did I?’

‘Yep…’

A hand fixes itself on Em’s shirt as Farro pulls herself into a sitting position. ‘You okay?’ she asks. Em nods. And then, the grip gets tighter. ‘Wait. Where’s my flare gun? Stray? Did you lose my flare gun?’

Em drops the still-warm gun into Farro’s lap.

‘Oh, I like you. I like her, Ludi…’ And Farro sinks back to the floor.

‘Those things can die!’ Ren shouts. He’s standing over the hole, shielding his madman grin from the heat. He looks over at Em. ‘Those things can die. Ludi, fair’s fair: your Stray killed something, you win the War. You’re welcome.’

And with that, he’s gone. A sharp whistle scatters half the Fireflies to the wind, until only the one tribe remains with their now-burning prize. There’s a small chorus of cheers, but more than a few seem to still be recovering from the shock. Em included. She lets Song pull her up.

‘You okay to walk?’ Ludi asks.

‘No, you’ll have to carry me.’

‘Didn’t ask you, Farro.’

‘Wasn’t a request, _Ludi._ ’ Farro sticks out her tongue and loops her arm around Ludi’s neck to get her footing back. ‘Let’s get out of here. Pack up, people.’

The Fireflies pulls themselves together, some still nursing cuts or bloody noses from the War as they search for their backpacks. Em goes to follow, but Ludi stops her. ‘Come with me.’ He starts walking back to the entrance, digging through his backpack as he whistles some half-tune.

‘Ludi...’

‘Yeah?’

‘You didn’t leave me behind.’

Ludi stops, looks back at her. Some thought plays with the dark rings under his eyes, twitching at the skin. ‘Was all that on purpose? Did you intentionally jump into a deep, dark hole with a monster?’

Em has a problem with faces like his. She can’t tell if he’s angry, or happy, or just joking. ‘No…’

He has a face like her father’s. Almost. Ludi’s eyes actually glint when a smile breaks the surface. ‘So you didn’t make a mistake?’

‘I guess not.’

‘Then why would I leave you behind?’ They’ve reached the front doors and Ren’s stencil, where Ludi fishes a can of spray paint from his pack and tosses it to Em, before retrieving a square of paper.

He holds it to the light. Cut out against the dying light of day is the image of a face. ‘This is us, see?’ Ludi presses it to the wooden door. ‘Spray over it for me.’

Em sees him put a sleeve to his nose. She copies him. Presses a sleeve to her nose and runs the spraypaint across the paper, until everything is black.

And the face appears again, on the red wood beside the monkey and his gear; five black cuts that make the sweep of a cheek and jaw, a brow, the shadow of a nose, the bags beneath an unseen eye. Em stands back. It makes sense. _This is us_.

 

 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But once upon a time, she decided that life had three movements. To drift, and take what you have, and imagine the rest will come to you; to run, and go hunting for the things you wanted, without any promise of a reward; or stand, and stay, and accept where you are and the course of your life as it stood. And the last to her had always seemed like pushing your head into a basin filled with water and forcing yourself to take a breath – it went against every instinct you had, it hurt the place that some people call a soul, and while the outcome was never certain, it would always lead to the end of who you once were.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for waiting so long for this! This is the taking a deep breath chapter, and I wanted to write this when I could take a deep breath too and let Em do her thing. Hope you like it :)

Chapter Six 

 

This is a day that Em should love. The winds run like rivers through the City, casting before them the detritus of living things, leaves and feathers and small shining insects, carrying with them a scent that lingers on the edge of a memory, but not near enough to name. This is a day that makes her bones ache. 

And right now, she barely feels the wind, and the passing scent, as bitter as perfume, never lingers long enough to whet her senses. Today she sees how tired the others look – they’d never shown it before – that they run with hunched shoulders in silence and in step, like people who have only one hope left in the world, like people who see the journey’s end in a place more distant and less true than memory. 

‘Smells like home.’ Song distracts her for the first time in hours. Em doesn’t ask where home is. 

‘Where are we going?’ she asks instead. 

‘To the best place in the world.’ And she says nothing else, only gives Em a mad grin and picks up the pace as Ludi gives a shrill whistle and Farro glares back in their direction. 

They’re running through a valley of giants. There are hundreds of them, colossi carved from red marble, or cast in rusting metal, moulded in concree, clutching to the sides of towers or rising from the deep dark below. Em looks up, and sees the faces of women and men whose names are forgotten, and sees above them yet more giants, up and up, until the last – the figure of an old woman – sits crumbling at the peak of the highest tower. Deeper, and the sun sets, and the shine of their lanterns carves out a landscape from the dark. The statues grow in number, in size, and the Fireflies run in their shadows, and silence almost falls, except for the echo of their feet scraping against stone. The City folds in around them like the arms of a mother. The sky disappears. The path falls away. The Fireflies make their way by the limbs of the giants, crawling across arms and shoulders and open palms, towards… something. Some source of noise. Of music. The horizon changes again: the cave is now a shadowed valley, formed between two towers, and Em can’t see the end of it. She looks down and sees water lapping at the base of her giant, and every other beyond… and… 

‘Oh…’ 

In the half-drowned valley, a gigantic pillar of black stone rises from the waters. Lights dance around it, and a hundred, hundred stars hang above. Her heartbeat races. The music grows louder. 

Em hears Ludi speaking to her. ‘See? That’s why they call us “Fireflies”.’ 

And she sees the way the lanterns look at a distance – the way one hangs from a belt and dances with every step. She realises that the stars above are just more lanterns, hanging from the face of a fallen tower that seals the valley from the sky. To a Firefly, these things are true. That is their sky. Those are their stars. 

By the glow of the hanging lights they make their way to the pillar. The giants come to an end. Only one stands apart, the steel effigy of a masked woman, marred by graffiti, her fists clenched by her sides and a dozen ropes tied to bolts hammered into her chest. A rope bridge extends out towards the lonely pillar. 

The Fireflies out shouts of joy, calling out towards the still far-off dancing lights, some of which seem to pause in recognition – and voices shout in return and suddenly the tribe splinters, sprinting and leaping madly between the statues towards the masked woman and Em is caught up in the insanity and finds her voice joining theirs, calling out towards those on the far side, though she knows nobody there waits for her but she hopes otherwise and she doesn’t care anyway because the beat of the music is like a second heartbeat in her head and she feels like a pair of wings have formed from her shoulder blades and in the glow from the place of hanging lights Em knows that she would never sleep again, if she ever had a choice. 

 

The wind changes, fierce with sudden cold, now humid and laden with the smell of campfires, of sweat, of flowers woven into garlands and stretched out overhead to catch the night with sweet scent and colours alien to the long night of the City and the endless day of this place. 

She has to hand over her lantern, here – just as other Fireflies leave, taking their lights with them, so her tribe gives, keeps the dark away. For the first time she feels as though she’s lost something as she hangs the teardrop on a hook, watches it soar up to join the other lanterns high above. She tries to fix in her mind which of the stars is hers, but now Song is taking her by the hand and dragging her away into the crowds and maddening source of her senses. 

There are pathways across this pillar, spray-painted over the foot-worn carvings, lurid against the black stone – handprints silhouetted against blasts of neon paint, interlocked and winding in nowhere patterns. These strange paths lead through a living maze of patchwork tents and shelters thrown together from old detritus. A Firefly holds a piece of glass to a candle flame, and thrown against a wall of rusting steel is the image of a woman frozen in time, a still flame darting before her lips as she rests her black against the flank of some metal…thing, and her image in the yellow-black shadow seems almost real. Em stares at her. She doesn’t know why. 

They’re walking under canvas eaves in a marketplace where children scatter scraps of metal on the floor for barter, or trade in curios stolen from the darkness of some empty tower. There’s meat cooking on charcoals. Song’s seen it, too. She trades a coil of copper wire for a handful of dark meat, which tastes of ash, and fat, and heat, and it’s the first cooked thing Em’s eaten in forever, and she licks the grease off her fingers, and doesn’t ask what creature the too-sweet flesh came from. 

‘Oi!’ Em nearly chokes at hearing the familiar voice. Ren strides through the marketplace towards them, smiling like they never fought a War. ‘You’re still alive, Stray!’ 

‘He seems happy,’ mutters Song. ‘You should be scared.’ 

‘This is the girl!’ Ren calls out to someone else. 

Another Firefly appears, staring hard at Em. ‘Bullshit. You killed an Ape?’ 

‘Yeah. And?’ Song answers for her. 

‘Nothing. Just don’t believe it, that’s all…’ the boy mutters. 

‘No, she did! She set it on fire and everything!’ You could hear Ren in the middle of a thunderstorm. He’s louder, he’s drawing a crowd as he describes in perfect detail how he watched the Ape’s flesh melt. And now they’re all looking at her. 

‘Seriously, though, Stray, you’re embarrassing me. Tell them!’ 

‘I mean…’ Em begins. ‘I didn’t set the Ape on fire. There was gas, and…’ She feels dizzy. ‘Technically, I blew it up.’ 

Nobody asks for her name. Em’s own story outruns her, carries itself away on a hundred, hundred voices: 

‘- the Stray who killed a Toy Ape, and a… spider… no, the Stray just outran the spider, but she outran a spider. She killed an Ape! No, the Ape was on fire… but she set it on fire. No, there was gas. She exploded an Ape! Bullshit, Apes can’t die. Ren’s a bullshitter, talking up the Stray that followed his tribe here… but Ren doesn’t take on Strays, so why would he lie? So who’d the Stray follow? Someone saw her come in with Ludi and Farro. Where are they? They’re asking Ludi now, and he’s no bullshitter. And he hates Ren, so he wouldn’t bullshit about him anyway. Nobody can find Farro. Ludi says the Stray was following them. He says that the Ape jumped them in a tower… no, Ren was there too… there was a War ‘cause Farro and Ludi stole his claim, except you can’t steal a claim. Except that you can. Shut up, and anyway, they were fighting when the Ape drops in through the ceiling… and fell through the floor, and the Stray went with it. And she’s climbing out and the Ape is coming for her… she blew it up -’ 

Em is a legend in that moment. She’s lost in the crowd of people demanding to hear the same story told over and over again. But she’s leading, being led, towards the music. 

She can’t remember why, but she’s always wanted to hear it… a deep drumbeat that lures her towards the heart of things, to a place where the hanging lights form a halo and bonfires rise from the ash-stained earth. 

It’s loud, here, loud enough to make her blood shiver in time with the beat. There’s a stage where the stone pillar reaches its highest point, surrounded on all sides by towers wreathed in cables - the music booms from dishes set into them. Just above, almost out of sight, Fireflies wield instruments that scream, hammer at drums in time, or wreathe themselves in wires and sprint between the pillars, making the music change as they pull a plug, twist at some hidden switch, or kick a transformer. 

The drums press her in. The heat of other bodies, the mad, senseless shudder that passes through the crowd, through her, and on and on. Song drags her through, and on the other of other strangers are her tribe. Are the tribe she followed here... when Song drifts among them Em feels briefly untethered. But they’re waiting for her, too. They’re shouting at her to dance, and she’s not been to a dance in years, but somehow she relaxes long enough to go insane and everyone applauds like her stupid moves are the best thing they’ve ever seen. 

Everyone is insane, and dancing stupid, and they’re dancing to music that shouldn’t be music. But Song is there, and Ludi too, shouting something in her ear, and Em is surrounded by people who know her, and someone leaps on Ludi’s shoulders, and someone takes Em’s hand again and the music is just music, but they are all alive, and they dance like the fear of life’s end is in them. 

It’s perfect. They are stick figures, dancing illuminated against the campfires. Shadows on the floor. Blurs of thought and wild, untethered happiness. They howl at the stars with the music. 

And it’s perfect, because Em isn’t thinking about anything. 

It’s perfect. And Em’s heart is racing. 

And her breath catches. 

And… 

‘No…’ 

Not here. Why here? There’s nothing wrong, nothing wrong, but her heartbeat gets louder than the music, and in the press of people she can’t breathe, and it is stupid, stupid, but she can’t breathe. The crowd is quicksand. Em fights against it, arms wrapped around herself to keep her heart from bursting out, and finally she shoves free of the press, into the tents beyond. She needs a place to hide. 

Someone calls her name and Em runs faster, through the gaps in a shanty, down a pathway covered in wooden boards. She sees only her feet as they lead on, until at last the path ends in some place where the music seems mercifully quiet, some hollow or cave carved deep into the stone. Then her feet fail her. Then her knees. She reaches out to grab at something before she falls, and finds it, and holds on as though gravity itself were about to fail and she would fall away into the black sky. 

‘There are seven hun-’ 

She chokes back a wave of nausea. Balls a fist into her forehead. 

‘There are seven hundred and… seven hundred and… thirty four… stars… in the… night sky… conventional science… dic… dictates that there must b…’ 

It has to work. Please. Her words are echoing. 

‘...must be… more in the universe... but so f-far... even the best telescopes have failed to find more… than a few the brightest stars that are visible to the naked eye include… the constellation of Hawking-Aeon and… the Gaia star which is bright enough to be visible during the day… astronomers have concluded that most stars including our own are in the later phases…’ 

It’s over. The less she cares about falling away, the less it hurts. The panic ebbs, leaving her stranded. Now she only feels tired. Now, she realises that her fingers are wrapped around someone’s wrist. 

Em jumps, tripping over her own feet and falling backwards. But Farro doesn’t move from she sits, cross-legged on the floor. 

‘You okay?’ she asks. 

‘Uh…’ What Em sees written in the shadows beneath Farro’s eyes makes her feel like a creep. ‘I’m sorry- ’ 

‘Don’t be stupid. Sit.’ She reaches out, scooping up some broken shard of pottery by Em’s foot. ‘Relax.’ 

Em looks down and sees the sweat on her palms glitter in time with the tremors. She draws her knees up to her chin, and keeps them there, clasped, steady. ‘Thanks.’ 

‘Yeah…’ Farro is half-listening, now. She drops a few grains of chemical salt on the floor, tapping at them with a rock until they hiss into life, brushing the sparks into the bowl of the pottery shard. 

‘You get them often? The attacks?’ She adds another handful, turning the embers into a warm purple flame. ‘Forget it, you don’t have to tell me.’ 

Em doesn’t. She looks away. She sees other fires burning around her, other vessels shaped from scrap, other shards of pottery, pieces of stone, the clawed hand of some statue, the remains of a Firefly’s lamp. Some of these are burning bright, creating a thin aurora of a dozen different hues; others are dying out with the tell-tale stink of old chemical salts; others are dead, leaving dull grey marks where they once burned. 

Around each vessel are pools of graffiti, chalk, charcoal, patterns and tribal tags. And names. One name to each. 

‘I used to.’ Farro says at last. She puts the shard down in a circle of its own, a halo of red and white chalk with the name “Thorn” writ large in the very centre. ‘I used to recite dirty rhymes to get over mine.’ 

Em smiles in spite of herself. ‘Yeah?’ 

‘Yeah. I was panicking at the time, so it was mostly the word “fuck” over and over again, but I was proud of a few.’ 

Farro almost smiles. ‘Feel better?’ At least, the thought of smiling seems to shine out of her eyes. 

Em nods. 

‘Good.’ Farro lets her fingers dance in the heat-blurred air above the flame. ‘Stray…’ 

‘Yeah?’ 

‘Why’d you follow us?’ 

Her stomach turns. Em had almost forgotten – that is, she let herself get caught up in her own problems. How long had it been, since she last thought of Uncle Peter? Days. Weeks? There was no way of telling. A long time. 

‘I’m looking for my uncle.’ 

Farro stares back at her in silence. And then: ‘Oh. Alright.’ 

‘Alright?’ Em had expected surprise, or maybe, hopefully, a question. But the girl seems bored. 

‘No, it’s fine. Tell me about your uncle.’ 

‘Hang on. Was that the wrong answer?’ 

‘Come on, Stray, it’s never that complicated, is it? You’re not that complicated. Nobody is.’ And she comes closer, so that the smell of burning salt comes with her. 

‘Think about it. Everything we do, everything, comes down to three words. Those words are always selfish, too – we are hungry, we are thirsty, we are cold, we are afraid. And although we invent fucking great, poetic excuses, and live in fancy fucking houses with fireplaces and locked doors where we drink our kafei and eat corned-fucking-beef, we are still three words apart from why we’re really doing it all. You get it?’ 

Em bites her lip. She knows that Farro’s wrong. ‘I get it.’ 

‘Uh huh. Stray…’ Farro waits for Em to look back up at her. ‘I’m not saying your uncle isn’t important, but that day when you were standing at the edge, I’m gonna guess he didn’t push you. I think you jumped. You made that choice. And it’s all because of three words, Stray.’ 

‘So what are yours?’ Em feels like she’s trespassing again, but she doesn’t care, at least not until she sees Farro searching for the answer, and the pain that flickers across her face. 

‘I was tired.’ 

‘And…?’ 

‘And so I jumped. And I became a Firefly.’ Farro replies. ‘So, what about you?’ 

There’s a wrong answer, it seems, but Em knows only one. ‘I don’t know.’ She lies. 

Farro just shakes her head and gives her the same grin. ‘Well, those are three words, at least. You’ll figure it out. If you want to survive the City you will.’ She stands and brushes her hands off, offering one to Em. ‘Come one, enough of the deep-and-meaningful crap. I got a present for you.’ 

Em pulls herself up. ‘Did you know them?’ she asks, nodding to Thorn’s flame. 

‘Them? No. You just knocked it over when you came in.’ 

Em follows her out of the cave, back into the noise. In turning the corner she looks back once, and hopes to see the name that Farro burned salt for, but she sees nothing distinct. The place where they were sitting had only the shard with its purple flame, and nothing else but more distant, lonely flames and the remnants of old vessels that added nothing to that dark cave. 

 

Farro takes her to a place that’s almost in shadow, almost quiet, where folds of canvas and sewn-together rags form hammocks strung seven-beds high into the perpetual hum and twilight. She puts a scrap of copper into the hands of the girl standing watch. 

‘Pick one,’ she says to Em. ‘Sleep for as long as you like.’ 

Em can only blink at her. All the hours spent running dawn on her at once, and she can only manage a dumb: ‘Seriously?’ 

‘Absolutely. I won’t even throw anything at you, promise.’ She claps Em on the shoulder. ‘You did good, Stray. You ran well.’ 

‘Thank you.’ 

‘Oh, don’t…’ And Farro turns and walks back towards the noise. ‘Sweet dreams.’ She says over her shoulder. 

‘His name was Peter.’ The words aren’t aimed. They slip out carelessly into the space between them, and they’re somehow enough to stop Farro in her tracks. 

‘My uncle. Peter. He’s a Firefly. He’s only got two fingers on his left hand. He’s about 40, I guess.’ Em looks away as the girl turns around to face her. ‘Just in case you’ve seen him…’ 

She hears Farro walk off. 

Mechanically, Em drags herself forward, up into a middle hammock, where she falls in – she’s almost afraid that she’ll never fall sleep, but the rough fabric closes in around her, embraces her, rocks gently with the breeze and the movement of other sleepers, and draws her towards the thoughtless moments before sleep. 

She feels the hammock stir as someone else climbs up. She feels Song crawl in beside her. There’s enough space for two, curled up against each other in the warmth, the near darkness. 

‘Hey, Stray.’ 

‘Hey.’ 

‘You okay?’ 

‘Yeah…’ 

‘Good. It’d suck, having to look for another stoic bitch to befriend.’ 

‘You could try talking to a mirror.’ 

‘It wouldn’t be the same. Plus, all the mirrors down here are broken.’ 

‘Thanks.’ 

‘For what?’ 

‘Just…’ The word escapes Em. ‘Talking to me.’ 

‘That was easy…’ 

 

She dreams of home. Of walking through the empty village to the house, and finding that the rooms are all dust, and silence. And then she remembers who is waiting in the City, and she turns back and looks across the untamed wilderness towards the vast towers, all ablaze with electric light. Light that fills every window, decks the streets and bridges, spires, spans, in twisted, glowing paths, branched and split like the roots of a great tree. The City twists in the wind. It whispers. 

 

Em stirs, sluggish and confused. Em has forgotten her dream, and she struggles to remember where she is, until she feels the drum beat through the canvas of her hammock. Her backpack is still tangled around her ankles. There is nobody beside her. Song is gone. 

She climbs down from the hammock. Her limbs are stiff, like she’s slept for a year. But her head feels clearer, now, less clouded by that vague fog of fears that kept her running, and as she stretches, curling one arm behind her head and looking up into the stars, she remembers, briefly, who she was looking for. 

And then she thinks of someone else. 

There’s a boy sitting watch over the hammocks, absentmindedly drawing on the floor with a piece of charcoal. ‘Did you see a girl climb out of my hammock earlier?’ 

The prick grins at Em. ‘Wha?’ 

‘Oh, fuck off. I mean, she’s a friend… rags in her hair, arm tattoos, she’s got a mark…’ 

He nods, still grinning. ‘Yeah, yeah, Song. The girl from Farro and Ludi’s tribe. You that Stray that’s been following them?’ 

Em bites her lip. Maybe it’s something in the way the boy says the word. Stray. With his lips twisted in a smirk. Stray. Something rejected and turned out, some creature in their wake. It’s true, which is why it hurts. 

‘She’s gone.’ 

‘Great…’ 

‘Said that if you woke up you were to wait here for her.’ 

‘Yeah, well, she can find me.’ Did Em sound bitter? She didn’t feel that way. But still, as Em walks away, back into the full glare and noise of the place of hanging lights, she only knows she’s not waiting because Song didn’t wait for her. And besides, she’s only a stranger. There’s someone else here she needs to find. An old man in a City filled with children should be easy to find… 

She stumbles into Ludi whilst staring into space. 

‘Hey.’ Em steps aside, carries on a few feet more, and finds herself turning to stop and face him. ‘Hey…’ she repeats. 

‘Going somewhere?’ 

She shrugs. Maybe. No. She was only thinking of escape. ‘I didn’t want to wait around, you know?’ 

Ludi smiles. ‘I get it.’ He shoves his hands into his pockets, and looks away for a moment, his lips moving, completing some half thought out question, before he glances at her again. ‘How’re you doing?’ 

‘I’m fine.’ 

‘Farro told me about-’ 

‘I’m okay.’ Em feels the muscles in her jaw constrict. Farro had told him about the panic attack. Of course she had. ‘I’m okay, I promise, it was just-’ 

‘-your uncle.’ Ludi finishes. ‘I knew him. Know him, I mean. So does Farro. So does almost everyone here. Are you okay?’ 

Em had gone pale. ‘My uncle…?’ 

‘An old Firefly, with two fingers on his left hand, yeah?’ he asks. Em nods, slowly, and he continues. ‘Fell Peter, we call him. I didn’t think he had any relatives, much less… well, anyway, we know him. He’s almost a myth. I used to hear stories about him when I was starting out-’ 

‘But he’s here? He’s down here?’ It was as though some hidden wound inside her had been opened again, and from it pours pain, and hope, and she trails after Ludi as he makes his way through the marketplace: ‘Where is he? What tribe is he running with?’ 

‘That’s the bad news,’ he says. ‘I don’t know. Nobody would. I didn’t even know he was back until Farro told me you were looking for him. Fell Peter is what we call a Loner – a Firefly who lives in the places we won’t walk. Loners don’t seek out company, they don’t run with tribes, and they rarely visit the Surface. They’re crazy, and occasionally famous, as crazy can be. No offence.’ 

Em realises that she’s now keeping pace with Ludi, or he’s slowed to match hers. ‘You saying I can’t find him?’ 

Ludi shrugs. ‘You could, if you were stupid. If Fell Peter was back, he’d be where Loners walk, in the dark below, or high up at the tower tops, or deeper into the City – nowhere the tribes run…’ 

At last, they reach the edge of the pillar, to barren stone. Behind are the lights and noise, and ahead, and around, beyond the ring of light is the City, and the dark, and the flat faces of towers leaning in, as if they’re listening. Em flops down at the very edge, hangs her legs off, looks down into the quiet waters and a sees a giant fish swimming in and out through the windows of a sunken building. 

‘Stray…’ 

‘What?’ 

‘Go home.’ 

Em looks up. Ludi’s crouching beside her. 

‘You’re telling me.’ 

‘No. Because you’d stay, if just to spite my telling you. I’m offering. I know a few people here who are making runs for the Surface – I’ll put in a good word, they’ll be happy to take you.’ 

‘What about you?’ 

‘We’re making a small detour, first. No, better you run straight back. It’ll be easier, trust me. You can go home, and tell everyone it was a moment of madness, and in time they’ll believe you, and you’ll forget why you wanted to be here.’ 

Em scratches into the stone beside her, carving her name in the glasslike surface, as she tries to find some argument – it takes only eight strokes to complete. ‘Why’d you jump?’ she asks. 

Ludi sighs. ‘I loved someone. And he wouldn’t go without me, and we jumped together. We became Strays. We became Fireflies.’ 

He stares out into the distance, and for a moment Em loses his pale face somewhere in the half shadow cast by the glow behind, and the world ahead. ‘And he died.’ Em knows he’s saying it slowly, so she can understand. ‘And that was three years ago. That makes me old, by Firefly standards.’ 

‘I’m sorry.’ 

‘Don’t be. I’m not. I don’t even remember the life I had up there anymore, so it can’t have mattered. I don’t think I could go back, anyway. We’ve all got short lives down here, but back on the Surface – I could retire, live a hundred years and everyone will still treat me like I’m weird, like… well, like I’m a Firefly. So…’ 

He’s looking at her again, in that way that sends a shiver down the left side of her – like he already knows what she’s going to say. 

‘But Song, and Farro, and the others…’ 

‘Have already made up their mind, I imagine.’ 

She bites her lip. Maybe they don’t want her to follow anymore. Maybe. 

‘My Uncle…’ 

‘Pay any tribe that passes through March Edge for news. Someone’ll know something. That’s what I’d do.’ He says. ‘But, truly, don’t give up the life you’ve got to go searching for a man who deliberately tries to get lost, if that’s the only reason you’re here.’ 

For a second, Em believes him, believes everything. 

‘I…’ 

But once upon a time, she decided that life had three movements. To drift, and take what you have, and imagine the rest will come to you; to run, and go hunting for the things you wanted, without any promise of a reward; or stand, and stay, and accept where you are and the course of your life as it stood. And the last to her had always seemed like pushing your head into a basin filled with water and forcing yourself to take a breath – it went against every instinct you had, it hurt the place that some people call a soul, and while the outcome was never certain, it would always lead to the end of who you once were. 

‘I want to stay,’ she says. 

‘Why?’ 

‘Because I know why I’m here.’ She feels his sigh through her shoulder. ‘Ludi?’ 

‘Yeah?’ 

‘Do you tell everyone to go home?’ 

‘Yep.’ 

‘Does anyone ever agree?’ 

‘The one before you did. I didn’t like him, though.’ Ludi stands up, dusting his hands on his trousers. ‘Come on, then.’ 

‘Where?’ 

‘To find the others. Unless you’d rather not know what they decided about you?’ 

And without another word, she follows him back towards the lights, towards a cluster of tents that seem more like a pile of rags. Ludi stops by a doorway partially hidden in the side. 

‘After you. Unless you don’t want to know what they’ve decided? My offer still stands.’ 

Em only stares at him in reply, still daring herself to run away. She has that same spinning feeling in her head. It feels it had on the first, on the morning she ran, at the edge where she jumped, on the first step she took into the City… 

She shakes her head. ‘Fuck it…’ she says. 

For a moment she loses herself in a maze of rags, piled in thick enough to dampen the noise outside, enough that she has to guide herself by the orange light ahead, that when she stumbles through, at last, she’s blinded by the bonfire rising up from the centre of what seems to be a wide ring of empty faces. 

Her sight clears enough to see what’s set out on the ground before her. 

Canvas trousers, kneepads, gloves a shirt and hooded jacket. 

A rifle with a large barrel, with what look like four tin cans set out in a row before it. 

And a gasmask, with the snarling skull of an ape painted on it. 

Farro is standing just beside the pile. Ludi walks by, and stands beside her. 

‘So,’ Farro asks. ‘What’s your name?’ 

There are no words. 

‘My name is Em,’ she says. 

And suddenly they all rush in around her. Applause. Introductions – even Song and Ludi and Farro introduce themselves like they’ve just met her. And Song smears something over Em’s cheek and instinctively Em brushes her fingers over it and finds them covered with blue paint. And someone cheers. And someone passes over a bottle filled with liquid fire. And they press in on her and it is warm, like standing in sunlight on a cold and windy day. 

And it is hard to be happy. It is hard to write happy. But Em is happy.


End file.
